morningstar waltz
by Clavain
Summary: Sam walks out of the Cage speaking better Enochian than English and having spent more of his life below than above. One-shot, Sam-centric, angst.


**Title: morningstar waltz**

 **Description: Sam walks out of the Cage speaking better Enochian than English and having spent more of his life below than above.**

The individual who Sam knows best is Lucifer, however much he wishes things otherwise. The archangel has deconstructed him at root, completely stripped him away to his core, and run his hands over every inch of him (inside and out, he has clawed into Sam's intestines and torn through his ribs to hold his beating heart quivering within his hands).

There is no atom of his self which has not been tainted and shredded then sewn back together by Lucifer. It is the purest kind of ownership.

Dean may be written on the blueprint of Sam's soul, but Lucifer has written his own message in bold, obscuring it:

 **LUCIFER HAD BEEN HERE AND LEFT HIS MARK**

* * *

Enochian is the language carved into his mind. The words hold no heaven for him, they do not echo the angels they were designed to contain, but they reek of fear and damp and death. He tries not to remember, and wakes up screaming (thrashing and thowing his body recklessly about the bed to escape bonds that are both present and absent) in a language Dean does not understand.

If he had left the Cage at once and whole (whatever that means), his mouth would not have been able to form any words other than those of the oldest tongue beaten into him and standing as raised scars in his living memory.

(but he also would have been cowering and flinching and seizing and very likely dead, convinced that at any moment someone's face would morph into _his_ , and then he'd be pulled backwards by a chain around his neck and accept that this was the situation and he had no control, and he's still like that in part)

Sam hasn't broached the subject with Dean because he fears a levee breaking and something awful coming through, but he thinks that when he dies a thousand hounds will drag him back to hell and throw him back into Lucifer's Cage.

He would survive eternity in the Cage because Lucifer would will it even if he did not, but this time more of him would cease. Before he was boiled and flayed away, leaving just his core thrumming within him like a beating heart (deandean deandean), but if Lucifer had kept carving perhaps not even that would have remained.

If all that was waiting after death was being chiseled as Lucifer's blank marble (a cold dead stone) then it would have been better to have never left at all. Let him lose himself so he wouldn't have to feel it, at least.

* * *

Sam capitulated through his first words in the Cage. He knew how little power he had and was looking at an eternity in a locked room with the devil, it had been logical. There was no shame, or so he told himself.

Lucifer had laughed once, angrily, and torn him in two.

After that a more complete type of surrender had occurred, the repeated _please, sorry,_ and _anything but this._ No had fallen by the wayside, and the ironic thing was that he could not plead through the worst of it because he could not talk.

There had then been the angelic wars, two incomprehensible walls of light slamming into one another, bright pieces of grace spiralling into the gloom. They fractured and retreated and fought, Michael still firmly interwoven with Adam's oblivious soul and shielding it whilst wielding it as a weapon, with Sam in the corner trying to protect himself with hands that a soul didn't have.

He was inevitably torn and broken in the crossfire of this fraternal war, bombarded with the remote and overwhelming presence of the higher plane forced onto his, bursting the room like a festering boil. When a ceasefire was agreed and they split to tend to their wounds Lucifer slipped into his old scarred vessel Nick like a snakeskin and turned to Sam.

There's nowhere to hide in hell.

And after that, eventually, one of them would throw a stone and they would continue whilst Sam cowered and breathed, uncertain of whether it was a reprieve or worse.

* * *

 _What does it mean,_ Sam considers, _that I have more memories of Lucifer than Dean._

It doesn't necessitate a stronger emotional attachment (does he hate Lucifer more than he loves Dean? Does he hate Lucifer?) but it does show who forged him in anguish and blood.

The soul should not remember. It cannot cease or think or feel when stripped bare and tossed as driftwood on the seas of archangels using all their strength to obliterate each other. The experience is far removed from everything he has ever known. These scars he bears on his soul, of drowning under a flood of godlike energy for uncounted millenia, they are invisible.

But he remembers Lucifer's frustrations in brutal human closeness, with stench and sweat and burning flesh. He would gather the pieces of Sam scattered by his arguments with his brother and hold them almost gently, coaxing them into human form.

Then he'd take him apart, piece by piece, in all the creative ways only the founder of hell could. Lucifer would pretend to be Dean and sing to him whilst he cut the flesh away from Sam's limbs, leaving them skeletal and useless, until even the bones fell apart with nothing left to bind them.

* * *

The first time the scene changes to a forest and Bobby, Cas, and Dean stand there telling him that Cas broke the lock on the Cage, could get him out because he was human and the Cage was designed for archangels, he believes them. The illusion lasts four days of emotional abuse more effective because it is from the perceived real Dean before Lucifer appears and he's back on the rack like he'd never left it.

So many years pass after the first that he also falls for the second farce, and then the third. After the fourth he stops believing and locks himself in the bathroom, curled into a trembling ball, until Lucifer in his impatience returns to the more honest torture.

He only realizes when he gets out (thinks he got out, his brother seems so real and not particularly unpleasant and Dean flinches when he does, like Sam's fear causes him pain) that Lucifer was training him to always come back, or to be incapable of living outside. He cannot escape because he will always be waiting for Lucifer to jerk back the curtain and chain him to that familiar cold floor for another session.

This might be the Cage, it might not. And even if it's not, that's where he'll end up. So when Lucifer the potential hallucination orders him he obeys, and tells himself it's out of real fear for eventual pain, because the alternative that obedience is now an inextricable part of him terrifies him too much. He can't help but jerk upright when Lucifer tells him to, and press himself into the floor on his command.

Dean gives him odd looks but lets him be. He thinks these strange movements are one of the more harmless habits Sam picked up in the Cage.

He waits in cold terror for an order to kill Dean, uncertain of whether he could defy one or not.

* * *

Sam prays to Cas and meets him whilst Dean sleeps.

"H-he never pretended to be you..." Sam trailed off. "But he did lie. He said he never lied, but he did lie."

Castiel nods gravely, anciently, as though he understand how much the truth of this means to Sam, and the trust offered.

"Can you see my ribs?"

Cas, startled by the request, slumps minutely. For the unreadable angel, this is tantamount to a flinch.

"Yes."

"W-what... is there something written over the sigils?"

"Lucifer."

"C-can y-y-you r-r-remove..." Sam stutters hard, teeth chattering with the thought that he is marked so that any angel can see.

"No."

Sam puts Cas's quick disappearance down to disgust where anyone else would have considered it grief. He curls his hands around his chests and rocks slightly, reveling in (fake?) Lucifer's (temporary) absence.

"Sam?" Dean steps from the shadows. Sam knows that he cannot withhold a full body flinch, so he doesn't try. Dean holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "What were you saying to Cas?"

Sam laughs, because he hasn't even realized they were speaking in Enochian.

Dean looks disturbed. "Sammy? You okay? Anything I can..."

His insides hurt with the force of the laughter (but it is _his_ hurt) and he spits it out. "Lucifer carved his name onto my ribs. It's less showy than I would expect."

Dean hugs him. His eyes are leaking, Sam notes.

"He took me ballroom dancing once, you know." Sam says conversationally, all stutter gone. "We waltzed. It wasn't pleasant or romantic, even though he said that." A thrill runs through him at defying Lucifer out loud. It feels liberating.

Dean lets out a shuddering sob into his brother's shoulder.

"We danced to this music - stairway to heaven, and I remember this line-" _remember it because that was when he broke my other foot and we didn't slow down and he was cradling my weight and holding me just like that, and it was a waltz, not even the right kind of dance-_ "Something about the voices of those who stand looking. It made me think about you, up there, looking for me."

Sam takes in a deep breath and knows that these words are a double edged sword which will slay them both. "But I didn't hear your voice, or if I did then they weren't your words. And I know that, but you're still tangled up there. You see, he was wearing your skin just then."

"Sammy..." Dean chokes. Sam shushes him.

"I know you're not-" Sam halts abruptly at Lucifer's appearance halfway across the room and subsequent hand gesture. He knows that one means silence, although he only realizes that after he's stopped talking. He's been conditioned like one of Pavlov's slobbering dogs, only with pain instead of a bell.

He curls into Dean, away from Lucifer, and ignores the threats and humming and caresses.

* * *

He dreams of the cold grey endless ocean surrounding him in a sinking ship, with two storms on the horizon. He can't remember anything but he prays to the one name he knows (Dean).

No one arrives, the boat is torn apart, and he wakes up retching imagined salt water out of his throat. Lucifer stands above him as he does so, petting his hair. Sam pulls away and the hand tightens into a threat, so he stays still and endures.

 _Definitely like a dog._ He shudders.

* * *

Dean knew when Sam remembered the Cage that it had been worse than his own hell.

Anyway, Alastair had died. Sam would never have that closure. He couldn't imagine looking around every corner waiting to see that smug bastard ready to drag him back to the rack and burn his soul out of him until he became a demon.

No personal experience or pessimistic imagining prepared Dean for Sam's ultimate terror, all stops pulled out, screaming in a way he couldn't have imagined in his worst nightmares, a sound neither Zachariah nor Alastair had been able to create.

He was patient, he held him, but he was fucking scared and Sam could tell. And this responsibility he held for his brother was so crushing he could barely breathe. He would drift off and awaken to Sammy obsessively cleaning a gun (how had he found it? Dean had been sure to lock them all away) until his fingers bled.

Sam didn't register bleeding, raw fingers as pain anymore. He lifted dishes from the oven without gloves if Dean didn't stop him. That kind of agony was normal to Sam.

 _Two hundred years._

That was what Cas said, two hundred years which would have felt longer to Sam and been stretched by Lucifer. Longer than he had been alive, even including the forty years Alastair had taken.

Everyone was dead for longer than they were alive, if you thought about it. Only most didn't come back scarred by the experience.

* * *

Wild-eyed Sammy rambles urgently in Enochian (he always forgets English when he gets like this), grasping Dean's arm, and even though he nods Dean has no fucking clue what is leaving his brother's mouth. Sam always repeats this one word insistently, like it means something really important, and eventually Dean asks Cas to explain it to him.

Cas blinks. "It's the same as English. He's saying Dean."

His name twisted with the long vowels of Enochian. Sammy calls for him when he is at his worst.

He is still Sammy's protector. And he will never give up on his baby brother.

* * *

 **AN: Lucifer means "morningstar" in Latin, that's the origin of the title.**

 **I haven't written anything like this before (fanfiction containing canon characters about them in detail), but I've read a lot and would like to write more. Supernatural is amazing.**

 **I really like the post-modern fanfic format some people use (present tense, quite poetic, etc.) I'd like to master this form of writing, but I definitely have a way to go.**

 **Please review, and I may take requests (no promises) ;^D**

 **the tags I use on AO3 sum my intent up best:**

imagine if you lived for 30-ish years on earth, then went to hell for 200 years, you'd be fucked up, Sam got off lightly in the show, I mean he'd mostly speak Enochian for one thing, and his thought patterns would be completely different, that's what I'm trying to do, realistic Sam in and after the Cage 


End file.
